Originally Posted By: Dantius
Originally Posted By: Slarty
Yeah, the bottom line judgement I like to use is: have you actually made a game?
That is a absolutely ridiculous position. Since I have never made a movie, I can't blast Avatar?... So, Jeff has made the decision to stop making those games anymore, and move onto games that are merely obscenly immense, instead of criminally immense. He has tailored his games not to cater to the forumgoers, who represent a disproportionate segment of Jeff's actual customers, but the customers themselves, which leaves quite a few of you feeling shorted, to say the least.
It isn't a ridiculous position, and I'll explain why I hold it, but I also agree with you in part.
Criticism is important and necessary. The problem is that there is no such thing as truly objective criticism... every critic has his own vantage point. And that's fine, it's a legitimate one, but the artist always has a vantage point too. GOOD criticism -- like good art -- is one hundred percent about bridging the gap between the artist's vantage point, and the audience's. This requires understanding and accepting (1) what will work for the audience, and (2) where the artist is coming from. A lot of literary and music criticism in particular fails on the second count (pitchfork, I have a special set of curse words reserved for you), and this is very dangerous because it tries to squish the creative piece of art (yes, I am counting individually crafted video games as art in their way) and turn it into something min-maxed in a very ugly way. Lit crit is my definition of evil. Poor criticism is like Vogon poetry.
On the other hand, decay can occur in the other direction as I think it has with SW, or with Dickens' writing when he did all those serials -- when the focus is on word count and profit, the artist can lose track of (2) himself. Exile, Exile 2, Nethergate, and Geneforge were all full of Jeff. None of his other games have lived up to this in quite the same way.